29-V-2002.
(... 42 words...)
Tried to buy a new camera, to retire the Agfa, but the shop had trouble checking my address, we moved, I mistyped the phone number. 335 instead of 355, so back and forth and no sale. Nope, going through emails upstream I found that this was a camcorder for Go, she's got a film course, so she'll need one. It eventually arrived.
The weather is so-so, cloudy then sunny, humid and warm. The [swimming] pool was opened on saurday, and we went [there] twice so far (Lena and I - joined by her friend from down the street yesterday). It was a bit breezy on saturday and the water was still cold (but you get used [to it] in two minutes); yesterday it was okay already, so I let the girls stay in the water until they played enough. They don't complain tall* when they should get out, they know there's days and days [ahead].
On saturday we saw a very interesting family - father a black guy, of basketball player stature and height, mother a Chinese, not up to his shoulder, the kids black, curly and with slanted eyes. They were really sweet, Lena liked them too.
And we walked down to the mall meanwhile, Lena tried out some footwear, her actual size is 38.
She had a „field day“ today, i.e. they didn't even enter the classroom, they stayed in the yard all day. Said they went for a stroll around the area - where they couldn't go far, as there's only one exit (I mentioned their passion for cul de sacs). She brought the yearbook, with a huuuge bunch of pictures (mostly black-white, except a couple of color pages), and she appears on as much as four of them.
About school rules:
During a class you can't walk to the toilet just like that, the professor must write you a pass. The parents are not allowed to enter by second or third entrance... actually they may, but still need to visit the reception desk to write themselves a pass (the kind I can print myself) and to write down an entry in the log book (name, surname, car tags). And that's only the beginning.
Any insane rules may be attributed to one of the three reasons:
- a guy from Nashville** once sued someone, got hefty damages paid, and henceforth the thing became forbidden or mandatory to prevent another lawsuit on the same matter
- for security reasons (because someone may...
- because insurance costs much more if the rule is not enforced; also means that if someone means to collect the damages and they find out that some of the rules were broken, they won't pay.
Dad's comment: „They wrap every matter and institution in a multitude of wrappers, insurances and leave nothing to accidents.“ Nope, on the contrary, it's all left to the citizens' consciousness, but they see to it that they write down as much as possible, so if anything happens, to easily find who is to blame, counting on everyone's fear of lawsuits, which may hit one's pocket so severely that the recovery takes years :)
On thirtieth in Lena's school they had a continuation of that colonial day, the choir learned another batch of songs (allegedly from those times), mostly kids' mocking songs, and they danced a bit (the colonial age stuff), and they all had their turn at the microphone to say a sentence or two from the texts on the subject. The costumes, of course... (... 40 words...)
That school was built when before the area became popular, so later it turned to be few classrooms short, when they collected a hundred or two kids above the original estimate. The county managed by putting up this mobile home classrooms. It's got power, water, not sure of toilets, guess they have to go to the main building for that. Every classroom has its own access ramp, if there's a kid in a wheelchair, to be able to drive up, as it's not put on a slab but rather on concrete posts. Trailer park. Which is where these will probably end up, once the main building expands.
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* an injoke... once long ago Lena was rather noisy, and Go said to her „quiet, you'll wake Lena up“. She didn't get confused, „but I'm not sleeping... t'all“. So we remember it at times, by saying it the same way.
** the saying here is 'one guy from Šabac'. Since Šabac is the state capital of narodnjaci, translation comes by itself.
Mentions: Agfa, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), narodnjaci, in serbian
25-VIII-2024 - 23-XII-2025